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The Atlantic Online | June 2009 | What Makes Us Happy? | Joshua Wolf Shenk
12/31/09 10:15 PM
VIDEO:
Dr. George Vaillant shares insights from his decades of following the Grant Study men.
Such bravado had defined the study from the start. Arlie Bock—a brusque, no-nonsense physician who grew up in Iowa and
took over the health services at Harvard University in the 1930s—conceived the project with his patron, the departmentstore
magnate W. T. Grant. Writing in September 1938, Bock declared that medical research paid too much attention to sick
people; that dividing the body up into symptoms and diseases—and viewing it through the lenses of a hundred microspecialties—could
never shed light on the urgent question of how, on the whole, to live well. His study would draw on
undergraduates who could “paddle their own canoe,” Bock said, and it would “attempt to analyze the forces that have
produced normal young men.” He defined normal as “that combination of sentiments and physiological factors which in
toto is commonly interpreted as successful living.”
Bock assembled a team that spanned medicine, physiology, anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, and social work, and was
advised by such luminaries as the psychiatrist Adolf Meyer and the psychologist Henry Murray. Combing through health
data, academic records, and recommendations from the Harvard dean, they chose 268 students—mostly from the classes of
1942, ’43, and ’44—and measured them from every conceivable angle and with every available scientific tool.
Exhaustive medical exams noted everything from major organ function, to the measure of lactic acid after five minutes on a
treadmill, to the size of the “lip seam” and the hanging length of the scrotum. Using a new test called the
electroencephalograph, the study measured the electrical activity in the brain, and sought to deduce character from the
squiggles. During a home visit, a social worker took not only a boy’s history—when he stopped wetting his bed, how he
learned about sex—but also extensive medical and social histories on his parents and extended family. The boys interpreted
Rorschach inkblots, submitted handwriting samples for analysis, and talked extensively with psychiatrists. They stripped
naked so that every dimension of their bodies could be measured for “anthropometric” analysis, a kind of whole-body
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200906/happiness
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